"Young gentlemen assembled!—It makes no matter where—I only want to speak to you,So hear me where you are."Some vile incendiaryLast night was prowling round,Who set fire to our round-houseAnd burned it to the ground."I'll read the Naval Law;The man who dares to burnA round-house,—not the Enemy's,—A traitor's fate shall learn."And if a man there be,Who does this traitor know,And keeps it to himself,He shall suffer death also!"'Tis well, then, to tell, then,Who did this grievous ill;And, d—n him, I will hang him,So help me God! I will!"
"Young gentlemen assembled!—It makes no matter where—I only want to speak to you,So hear me where you are.
"Some vile incendiaryLast night was prowling round,Who set fire to our round-houseAnd burned it to the ground.
"I'll read the Naval Law;The man who dares to burnA round-house,—not the Enemy's,—A traitor's fate shall learn.
"And if a man there be,Who does this traitor know,And keeps it to himself,He shall suffer death also!
"'Tis well, then, to tell, then,Who did this grievous ill;And, d—n him, I will hang him,So help me God! I will!"
If anything could have added to the gayety of the fire, such an outburst would.
In after years I sailed under the command of this speechmaker. At monthly musters he reserved to himself the prerogative of reading theArticles, probably thinking that he did it more effectively than the first lieutenant; in which he was quite right. It so happened that, owing to doubt whether a certain paragraph applied to the Marine Corps, Congress had been pleased to make a special enactment that the word "persons" in such and such a clause "should be construed to include marines." Coming as this did near the end, some humorist was moved to remark that the first Sunday in the month muster was for the purpose of informing us authoritatively that a marine was a person. As the captain read this interesting announcement, his voice assumed a gradualcrescendo, concluding with a profound emphasis on the word "marines," which he accompanied with a half turn and a flourish of the book towards that honorable body, drawn up in full uniform, at parade rest, its venerable captain, whose sandy hair was fast streaking with gray, standing at its head, his hands meekly crossed over his sword-hilt, the blade hanging down before him; all doubtless suitably impressed with this definition of their status, which for greater certainty they heard every month. It was very fine, very fine indeed; appealing to more senses than one.
The shore drills—infantry and field artillery—furnished special occasions for organized—or disorganized—upheavals of animal spirits. For these exercises we then had scant respect. They were "soldiering;" and from time immemorial soldier had been an adjective to express uselessness, or that which was so easy as to pass no man's ability. A soldier's wind, for example, was a wind fair both ways—to go and to return; no demands on brains there, much less on seamanship. The curious irrelevancy of such applications never strikes persons; unless, indeed, a perception of incongruity is the soul of wit, a definition which I think I have heard. To depart without the ceremony of saying good-bye takes its name from the most elaborately civil of people—French leave; while the least perturbable of nations has been made to contribute an epithet, Dutch, to the courage derived from the whiskey-bottle. In the latter case, however, I fancy that, besides the tradition of long-ago national rivalries, there may have been the idea that to excite a Dutchman you must, as they say, light a fire under him; or as was forcibly remarked by a midshipman of my time of his phlegmatic room-mate, he had to kick him in the morning to get him started for the day.
To return to the shore drills: these were then committed to one of the civil professors of the Academy, a fact which itself spoke for the familiarity with them of the sea lieutenants. As these always exercised us at ships' guns, the different estimation which the two obtained in the outside service was too obvious to escape quick-witted young fellows, and it was difficult to overcome the resultant disrespect. The professor was not one to effect the impossible. He was a graduate of West Point, a man of ability, not lacking in dignity, and personally worthy of all respect; but he stuttered badly, and this impediment not only received no mercy from youth, but interfered with the accuracy of manœuvres where the word of command needed to be timely in utterance. Report ran that on one occasion, advancing by column of companies, while the professor was struggling with "H-H-H-Halt!" the leading company, composed martyrs to discipline, marchedover the sea-wall into three feet of water. Had the water been deeper, they might have been less literal. Despite his military training, his bearing and carriage had not the strong soldierly stamp which might redeem his infirmity, and even in the class-room a certain whimsical atmosphere seemed borne from the drill-ground. He, I believe, was the central figure of one of the most humorous scenes in Herman Melville'sWhite Jacket, a book which, despite its prejudiced tone, has preserved many amusing and interesting inside recollections of a ship-of-war of the olden time. The naval instructor on board the frigate is using Rodney's battle of 1782 to illustrate on the blackboard the principles of naval tactics to the class of midshipmen. "Now, young gentlemen, you see this disabled French ship in the corner, far to windward of her fleet, between it and the enemy. She has lost all three masts, and the greater part of the ship's company are killed and wounded; what will you do to save her?" To this knotty problem many extemporized "practical" answers are given, of which the most plausible is by Mr. Dash, of Virginia—"I should nail my colors to the mast and let her sink under me." As this could scarcely be called saving her, Mr. Dash is rebuked for irrelevance; but, after the gamut of possible solutions has been well guessed over, the instructor announces impressively, "That ship, young gentlemen, cannot be saved."
I cannot say that he dealt with us thus tantalizingly; but one of my contemporaries used to tell a story of his personal experience which was generically allied to the above. At the conclusion of some faulty manœuvre, the instructor remarked aloud: "This all went wrong, owing to Mr. P.'s not standing fast in his own person. We will now repeat it, for the particular benefit of Mr. P." The repetition ensued, and in its course the instructor called out, "Be careful, Mr. P., and stand fast whereyou are." "I am standing fast," replied P., incautiously. "R-R-Report Mr. P. for talking in ranks." At the Academy, naval tactics were not within his purview; and of all our experiences with him in the class-room, one ludicrous incident alone remains with me. One of my class, though in most ways well at head, was a little alarmed about his standing in infantry tactics. He therefore at a critical occasion attempted to carry the text-book with him to the blackboard. This surreptitious deed, being not to get advantage over a fellow, but to save himself, was condoned by public opinion; but, being unused to such deceits, in his agitation he copied his figure upside down and became hopelessly involved in the demonstration. The professor next day took occasion to comment slightingly on our general performance, but "as to Mr. ——," he added, derisively, "he did r-r-r-wretchedly."
I sometimes wonder that we learned anything about "soldiering," but we did in a way. The principles and theory were mastered, if performance was slovenly; and in execution, as company officers, we got our companies "there," although just how we did it might be open to criticism. In our last year the adjutant in my class, who graduated at its head, on the first occasion of forming the battalion, after some moments of visible embarrassment could think of no order more appropriate than "Form your companies fore and aft the pavement." Fore and aft is "lengthwise" of a ship. No humiliation attended such a confession of ignorance—on that subject; but had the same man "missed stays" when in charge of the deck, he would have been sorely mortified. His successor of to-day probably never will have a chance to miss stays. There thus ran through our drills an undercurrent of levity, which on provocation would burst out almost spontaneously into absurdity. On one occasion the battalion was drawn up in line, fronting at some distance the five buildings which thenconstituted the midshipmen's quarters. The intimation was given that we were to advance and then charge. Once put in motion, I know not whether stuttering lost the opportunity of stopping us, but the pace became quicker and quicker till the whole body broke into a run, rushed cheering tumultuously through the passages between the houses, and reformed, peaceably enough, on the other side. The captains all got a wigging for failing to keep us in hand; but they were powerless. The whole thing was without preconcertment or warning. It could hardly have happened, however, had the instinct of discipline been as strong in these drills as in others.
A more deliberate prank was played with the field artillery. These light pieces, being of the nature of cannon rather than muskets, obtained more deference, being recognized as of the same genus with the great guns which then constituted a ship's broadside. On one occasion they were incautiously left out overnight on the drill-ground. Between tattoo and taps, 9.30 to 10P.M., was always a half-hour of release from quarters. There was mischief ready-made for idle hands to do. The guns were taken in possession, rushed violently to and fro in mock drill performance, and finally taken to pieces, the parts being scattered promiscuously in all directions. Dawn revealed an appearance of havoc resembling a popular impressionist representation of a battle-field. Here a caisson with its boxes, severed from their belongings, stretched its long pole appealingly towards heaven; the wheels had been dispersed to distant quarters of the ground and lay on their sides; elsewhere were the guns, sometimes reversed and solitary, at others not wholly dismounted, canted at an angle, with one wheel in place. As there were six of them, complete in equipments, the scene was extensive and of most admired confusion; ingenuity had exhausted itself in variety, to enhance picturesqueness of effect. Howthe lieutenant in charge accounted for all this happening without his interference, I do not know. Certainly there was noise enough, but then that half-hour always was noisy. The superintendent of that time had, when walking, a trick of grasping the lapel of his coat with his right hand, and twitching it when preoccupied. The following day, as he surveyed conditions, it seemed as if the lapel might come away; but he made us no speech, nor, as far as I know, was any notice taken of the affair. No real damage had been done, and the man would indeed have been hard-heartedly conscientious who would grudge the action which showed him so comical a sight.
I once heard an excellent first lieutenant—Farragut's own through the principal actions of the War of Secession—say that where there was obvious inattention to uniform there would always be found slackness in discipline. It may be, therefore, that our habits as to uniform were symptomatic of the same easy tolerance which bore with such extravagances as I have mentioned; the like of which, in overt act, was not known to me in my later association with the Academy as an officer. We had a prescribed uniform, certainly; but regulations, like legislative acts, admit of much variety of interpretation and latitude in practice, unless there is behind them a strong public sentiment. In my earlier days there was no public sentiment of the somewhat martinet kind; such as would compel all alike to wear an overcoat because the captain felt cold. In practice, there was great laxity in details. I remember, in later days and later manners, when we were all compelled to be well buttoned up to the throat, a young officer remarked to me disparagingly of another, "He's the sort of man, you know, who would wear a frock-coat unbuttoned." There's nothing like classification. My friend had achieved a feat in natural history; in ten words he had defined a species. On another occasion the same manremorselessly wiped out of existence another species, consecrated by generations of blue-books andNaval Regulations. "I know nothing of superior officers," he said; "senior officers, if you choose; but superior, no!" Whether theNaval Regulationshave yet recognized this obvious distinction, whether it is no longer "superior officers," but only senior officers, who are not to be "treated with contempt," etc., I have not inquired. Apart from such amusing criticism of the times past, it is undoubtedly true that attention to minutiæ is symptomatic of a much more important underlying spirit, one of exactness and precision running through all the management of a ship and affecting her efficiency. I concede that a thing so trifling as the buttoning of a frock-coat may indicate a development and survival of the fittest; but in 1855–60 frock-coats had not been disciplined, and in accordance with the tone of the general service we midshipmen were tacitly indulged in a similar freedom. This tolerance may have been in part a reaction from the vexatious and absurd interference of a decade before with such natural rights as the cut of the beard—not as matter of neatness, but of pattern. Even for some time after I graduated, unless I misunderstood my informants, officers in the British navy were not permitted to wear a full beard, nor a mustache; and we had out-breaks of similar regulative annoyance in our own service, one of which furnished Melville with a striking chapter. Discussing the matter in my presence once, the captain of a frigate said, "There is one reply to objectors; if they do not wish to conform, they can leave the service." Clearly, however, a middle-aged man cannot throw up his profession thus easily.
Another circumstance that may have contributed to indifference to details of dress was the carefulness with which the old-time sea officers had constantly to look after the set and trim of the canvas. Every variation of the wind, everychange of course, every considerable manœuvre, involved corresponding changes in the disposition of the sails, which must be effected not only correctly, but with a minute exactness extending to half a hundred seemingly trivial details, upon precision in which depended—and justly—an officer's general reputation for officer-like character. Not only so, but the mere weight of rigging and sails, and the stretching resultant on such strain, caused recurring derangements, which, permitted, became slovenliness. Yards accurately braced, sheets home alike, weather leaches and braces taut, with all the other and sundry indications which a well-trained eye instinctively sought and noted, were less the dandyism than the self-respecting neatness of a well-dressed ship, and were no bad substitute, as tests, for buttoned frock-coats. The man without fault in the one might well be pardoned, by others as well as himself, for neglects which had never occurred to him to be such. His attention was centred elsewhere, as a man may think more of his wife's dress than his own. After all, one cannot be always stretched with four pins, as the French say; there must be some give somewhere.
The frock was then the working coat of the navy. There was fuller dress for exceptional occasions, in which, at one festive muster early in the cruise, we all had to appear, to show that we had it; but otherwise it was generally done up in camphor. The jacket, which was prescribed to the midshipmen of the Academy, had informal recognition in the service, and we took our surviving garments of that order with us to sea, to wear them out. But, while here and there some officer would sport one, they could scarcely be called popular. One of our lieutenants, indeed, took a somewhat sentimental view of the jacket. "There was Mr. S.," he said to me, speaking of a brother midshipman, "on deck yesterday with a jacket. It looked so tidy and becoming. If there had been anything aloftout of the way, I could say to him, 'Mr. S., just jump up there, will you, and see what is the matter?'" War, which soon afterwards followed with its stern preoccupations and incidental deprivations, induced inevitably deterioration in matters of dress. With it the sack-coat, or pilot-jacket, burrowed its way in, the cut and insignia of these showing many variations. The undergraduates at the Academy in my day had for all uses a double-breasted jacket; but it was worn buttoned, or not, at choice. On the rolling collar a gold foul anchor—an anchor with a rope cable twined round it—was prescribed; but, while a standard embroidered pattern was supplied at the Academy store, those who wished procured for themselves metal anchors, and these not only were of many shapes and sizes, but for symmetrical pinning in place demanded an accuracy of eye and hand which not every one had. The result was variegated and fanciful to a degree; but I doubt if any of the officers thought aught amiss. So the regulation vest buttoned up to the chin, but very many had theirs made with rolling collar, to show the shirt. I had a handsome, very dandy, creole classmate, whom an admiring family kept always well supplied with fancy shirts; and I am sure, if precisians of the present day could have seen him starting out on a Saturday afternoon to pay his visits, with everything just so—except in a regulation sense—and not a back hair out of place, they must have accepted the results as a testimony to the value of the personal factor in uniform. Respect for individual tastes was rather a mark of that time in the navy. Seamen handy with their needle were permitted, if not encouraged, to embroider elaborate patterns, in divers colors, on the fronts of their shirts, and turned many honest pennies by doing the like for less skillful shipmates. Pride in personal appearance, dandyism, is quite consonant with military feeling, as history has abundantly shown; and it may be thatsomething has been lost as well as gained in the suppression of individual action, now when an inspecting officer may almost be said to carry with him a yard-stick and micrometer to detect deviations.
A very curious manifestation of this disposition to bedeck the body was the prevalence of tattooing. If not universal, it was very nearly so among seamen of that day. Elaborate designs covering the chest, or back, or arms, were seen everywhere, when the men were stripped on deck for washing. There was no possible inducement to this except a crude love of ornament, or a mere imitation of a prevailing fashion, which is another manifestation of the same propensity. The inconvenience of being branded for life should have been felt by men prone to desertion; but the descriptive lists which accompany every crew were crowded with such remarks as, "Goddess of Liberty, r. f. a."—right forearm—the which, if a man ran away, helped the police of the port to identify him. My memory does not retain the various emblems thus perpetuated in men's skins; they were largely patriotic and extremely conventional, each practised tattooer having doubtless his own particular style. Many midshipmen of my time acquired these embellishments. I wonder if they have not since been sorry.
In the preceding pages my effort has been to reconstitute for the reader the navy, in body and in spirit, as it was when I entered in 1856 and had been during the period immediately preceding. There was no marked change up to 1861, when the War of Secession began. The atmosphere and environment which I at first encountered upon my entrance to the Naval Academy, in 1856, had nothing strange, or even unfamiliar, to a boy who had devoured Cooper and Marryat—not as mere tales of adventure, but with some real appreciation and understanding of conditions as by them depicted. I had studied, as well as been absorbed by them. Cooper is much more of an idealist and romancer than is Marryat, who belongs essentially to the realistic school. Some of the Englishman's presentations may be exaggerated, though not beyond probability—elaborated would perhaps be a juster word—and in one passage he expressly abjures all willingness to present a caricature of the seaman he had known. Cooper, on the other hand, while his sea scenes are well worked up, has given us personalities which, tested by Marryat's, are made out of the whole cloth; creations, if you will, but not resemblances. Marryat entered the navy earlier than his rival, and followed the sea longer; his experience was in every way wider. Even in my time could be seen justifications of his portrayal; but who ever saw the like of Tom Coffin, Trysail, or Boltrope?
The interested curiosity concerning all things naval which possessed me, and held me enthralled by the mere sight of an occasional square-rigged vessel, such as at rare intervals passed our home on the Hudson, fifty miles from the sea, led me also to pore over a copy of theAcademy Regulationswhich the then superintendent, Captain Louis Goldsborough, (afterwards Admiral), had sent my father. The two had been acquaintances in Paris, in the twenties of the century and of their own ages. I have always had a morbid fondness for registers and time-tables, and over them have wasted precious hours; but on this occasion the practice saved me a year. I discovered that, contrary to the established rule at the Military Academy, an appointee to the Naval might enter any class for which he could pass the examinations. Further inquiry confirmed this, and I set about fitting myself. At that date, even more than at present, the standard of admission to the two academies had to take into account the very differing facilities for education in different parts of the country, as well as the strictly democratic method of appointment. This being in the gift of the representative of the congressional district, the candidates came from every section; and, being selected by the various considerations which influence such patronage, the mass of lads who presented themselves necessarily differed greatly in acquirements. Hence, to enter either Annapolis or West Point only very rudimentary knowledge was demanded. Having grown up myself so far amid abundant opportunity, and been carefully looked after, I found that I was quite prepared to enter the class above the lowest, except in one or two minor matters, easily picked up. Thus forewarned, I came forearmed. There were probably in every class a dozen who could have done the same, but they accepted the prevailing customwithout question. I believe I was the only one fortunate enough to make this gain. In some instances before, and in many after, the academic work was for certain classes compressed within three years, but I was singular in entering a class already of a twelvemonth's standing.
About my own examination I remember nothing except that it was successful; but one incident occurred in my hearing which has stuck by me for a half-century. One other youth underwent the same tests. He had already once entered, two or three years before, and afterwards had failed to pass one of the semi-annual tests. Such cases frequently were dropped into the next lower class, but the rule then was that a second similar lapse was final. This had befallen my present associate; but he had "influence," which obtained for him another appointment, conditional upon passing the requirements for the third class, fourth being the lowest. Examinations then were oral, not written; and, preoccupied though I was with my own difficulties, I could not but catch at times sounds of his. He was being questioned in grammar and in parsing, which I have heard—I do not know whether truly—are now looked upon as archaic methods of teaching; and the sentence propounded to him was, "Mahomet was driven from Mecca, but he returned in triumph." His rendering of the first words I did not hear, my attention not being arrested until "but," which proved to him a truly disjunctive conjunction. "But!" he ejaculated—"but!" and paused. Then came the "practical" leap into the unknown. "'But' is an adverb, qualifying 'he,' showing what he is doing." Poor fellow, it was no joke to him, nor probably his fault, but that of circumstances. When released from the ordeal, we stood round together, awaiting sentence. He was in despair, nor could I honestly encourage him. "Look at you," he said, "as quiet as if nothing had happened"—I was by no means confident that I hadcause for elation. "If I were as sure that I had passed as that you have, I should be skipping all over the place." I never heard of him again; but suppose from his name, which I remember, and his State, of which I am less sure, that he took, and in any event would have taken, the Confederate side in the coming troubles. His loss by this failure was therefore probably less than it then seemed.
An intruder, in breach of well-settled precedent, might have expected to be looked on askance by the class which I thus unusually entered. Not the faintest indication of discontent was ever shown, nor I believe felt, even by those over whom I subsequently passed by such standing as I established, although the fact meant promotion over them. The spirit of the officer and the gentleman, which disdained hazing, disdained discourtesy equally, and thrust aside with the generosity of youth the jealousy that mature years more readily cherishes towards competitors. The habit in those days was to distinguish classes, not by the year of graduation, but by that of entry—colloquially, the so-and-so "Date"—a manner derived from an earlier period, when there was no other chronological point of departure for the career; and in those "days before the flood" nothing would have tempted us to depart from a time-honored custom. "Dates" frequently established among their contemporaries reputations analogous to those of individuals. At that time the "'41 Date," then in the prime of life, was obnoxious to those below it; not for its own fault, but because of its numbers, which, with promotion strictly by seniority, constituted a superincumbent mass that could not but be regarded bitterly by those who followed. At present there would be the consolation that retirement, though distant, would ultimately sweep them all away nearly simultaneously; but there was then no retired list. Whatever the motive, the Secretary of the Navy had been moved to introduce, in 1841, over twohundred midshipmen,[4]which put an almost total stop to appointments for several subsequent years, and gave the "Date" the invidious distinction it enjoyed. The well-known character in the service whose hoisting a demijohn for a flag I have before mentioned, and who found this great overplus above him, was credited with saying that those of them who did not drink themselves to death would strut themselves to death—a comment which testified rather to the warmth of his feelings than to the merits of the case. Of course, the greater the total, the more numerous the unworthy; and the unfortunate natural bias of mankind notices these more readily than it does the capable.
The class to which I now found myself admitted was the "'55 Date," and whatever their reputation in the service, then or thereafter, they thought themselves uncommonly fine fellows, distinctly above the average—not perhaps in attainments, which was a subsidiary matter, but in tone and fellowship. One among them, a turn-back from the previous Date, and for two years my room-mate, used to declare enthusiastically that he was glad of his misfortune, finding himself in so much better a crowd. I doubt if I could have gone as far as this, but in the general estimate I agreed fully. We numbered then twenty-eight, having started with forty-nine a twelvemonth before. Three years later we were graduated, twenty. The dwindling numbers testifies rather to the imperfection of educational processes throughout the country than to the severity of the tests, which were very far below those of to-day. I have often heard it said, and believe it true, that the difficulty was less with the knowledge—that is, the nominal acquirements—of the appointees than with the then prevalent methods of study and instruction, which had debauched the powers of application. My father, after a long experience, used to think that upon the whole there was better promise in a youth who came with nothing more than the three R's, which then constituted substantially the demands of the Military Academy, than in one with a more pretentious showing. The first had not to unlearn bad habits. An illustration that the courses were not too severe, for an average man beginning with the very smallest equipment, is afforded by a true story of the time. A lad from one of the Southern States,—Tennessee, I think,—having obtained an appointment, and being too poor to travel otherwise, walked his way to West Point, and then failed of admission. The affecting circumstances becoming known, a number of officers dubbed together and supported him for a year at a neighboring excellent school. He then entered, passed his course successfully, and proved a very respectable officer. There was, I believe, nothing brilliant in his record, except the earnestness and resolution shown; the absence of these, under demands which, though not excessive, were rigid, was the principal cause of failures.
The requirements were certainly moderate, and our healths needed not to suffer from over-application. The marking system of that time gave the numeral 4 as a maximum, with which standard 2.5 was a "passing average." He who reached that figure, as the combined result of his course of recitations and stated examinations, passed the test, and went on, or was graduated. The recitation marks being posted weekly, we had constant knowledge of our chances; and of the necessity of greater effort, if in danger, whether of failure or of being outstripped by a competitor. The latter motive was rarely evidenced, although I have seen the anxious and worried looks of one struggling for pre-eminence over a rival who amused himself by merely prodding where he might havesurpassed. It is only fair to add, as I also witnessed, that no congratulations were more warmly received by the victor than those of the man who had so constantly trod on his heels. It is needless to say, to those who know the world in any sphere of life, that a certain proportion were satisfied with merely scraping through. The authorities leaned to mercy's side, where there was reasonable promise of a man's making a good sea officer. In the later period of written examinations an instructor of much experience said to me, "If a man's paper comes near 2.5, I always read it over again with a leaning towards a more favorable judgment on points;" and he accompanied the words with a gesture which dramatically suggested a leaning so pronounced that, it would certainly topple over the right way. Not strictly judicial, I fear, but perhaps practical. There were rare instances who played with 2.5, enticed perhaps by the mysterious charms of danger. Such a case I heard of, a man of unquestioned ability, who it was rumored boasted that he would get just above 2.5, and as near as he could. He was read dispassionately, and in the event came out 2.47. As an effort at approximation, this may be considered a success; but for passing it was inadequate, and his general character did not bias the final appeal in his favor. He was not dropped, indeed, but had to undergo a second examination three weeks later: a circumstance calculated to cloud his summer. A more amusing instance came directly under my observation. He was a candidate for entrance, and I then head of one of the departments of the Academy. Although I had nothing to do with admissions, his father came in to see me immediately after the results were known. He had a marked brogue, and was slightly "elevated," by success and by liquor. Placing his hand confidentially on my arm, he whispered: "He's got in; he's got in." I expressed my sympathy. He drew himself up with a smile of exultation, and said: "He onlygot a 2.7. I said to him, '——, why didn't you do better than that?—sure you could.' 'Whisht, father,' he replied, 'why should I do better, when all I need's a 2.5?' Just fancy his thinking of that!" cried the proud parent. "The 'cuteness of him?" I forget this lad's further career, if I ever knew it.
One of the distinguishing features of the two academies then, and I believe now, was the division of the classes into small sections, under several instructors. This gave the advantage of very frequent recitations for each student. None was safe in counting upon being overlooked on any day, and the teacher was kept familiar with the progress and promise of every one under his charge. It admitted also of a more extensive course for those who could stick in the higher sections—a kind of elective, in which the election depended on the teacher, not the taught. Thoroughness of acquisition was favored by this steady pressure, the virtue of which lay less in its weight than in its constancy; but it is practicable only where large resources permit many tutors to be employed. The Naval Academy has had frequent difficulty, not chiefly of a money kind, but because the needed naval officers cannot always be spared from general service. A sound policy has continuously favored the employment of sea officers, where possible; not because they can often be equal in acquirement to chosen men from the special fields in question, but because through them the spirit and authority of the profession pervades the class-room as well as the drill-ground, and so forwards the highly specialized product in view. Besides, as I have heard observed with admiration by a very able civilian, head of one of the departments, who had several officers under him, the habit of turning the hand to many different occupations, and of doing in each just what was ordered, following directions explicitly, gives naval officers as a class an adaptability and a facility whichbecome professional characteristics. It may be interesting to note that the same was commonly remarked of the old-time seaman. His specialty was everything—versatility; and he was handy under the least expected circumstances, on shore as well as afloat. Burgoyne used chaffingly to attribute his misfortunes at Saratoga to the aptitude with which a British midshipman and seamen threw a bridge over the upper Hudson. "If it had not been for you," he said to the culprit, "we should never have got as far as this."
In my day the proportion of officers was less than afterwards, when the graduates themselves took up the task of instruction. There were two who taught us mathematics, one of whom remains in my memory as the very best teacher, to the extent of his knowledge, that I ever knew. The professional branches, seamanship and gunnery, fell naturally to the sea officers who conducted the drills. These studies, as pursued, reflected the transition condition of the period which I have before depicted; the grasp on the old still was more tenacious than that on the new. The preparation of text-books for young seamen far antedated the establishment of naval schools. There was one,The Sheet Anchor, by Darcy Lever, a British seaman, published before 1820, which had great vogue among us. Among other virtues, it was illustrated with very taking pictures of ships performing manœuvres in the midst of highly conventional waves. As far as memory serves me, I think we were justified in regarding it as more instructive than the American work assigned to us by the course,The Kedge Anchor, by a master in our navy named Brady. A kedge, the unprofessional must know, is a light anchor, dropped for a momentary stop, or to haul a ship ahead, the title being in so far very consonant to the object of instruction; whereas the sheet-anchor is the great and last stand-by of a vessel, let go as a final resource after thetwo big "bowers," which constitute the usual reliance. The rareness with which the sheet anchor touched ground (the bottom) gave rise to the proverb, "To go ashore with the sheet anchor," as the ultimate expression of attention to duty; and the story ran of a British captain, a devoted ship-keeper, who, to a lieutenant remonstrating on the little privilege of leave enjoyed by the junior officers, replied: "Sir, when I and the sheet anchor go ashore, you may go with us." By the prescription of our seniors we had to tie toThe Kedge Anchor, let us hope in the cause of progress, to haul us ahead; but in a tight placeThe Sheet Anchorwas our recourse, and by it think I may say we—swore. I always mistrustedThe Kedge Anchorafter my researches into a mysterious sentence—"A celebrated master, now a commander, in the navy never served the bowsprit rigging all over." In the old-time frigates, of the days of Nelson and Hull, the master was at the head of the marling-spike division of the ship's economy, being, in fact, the descendant of the master (captain) of more than a century earlier, who managed the ship while soldiers commanded and fought her. But the masters were not in the line of promotion; in the British navy they rarely rose, in our own much more rarely. Who, then, was this celebrated master, now a commander? Eventually I found the sentence in a British book, and my faith in the pure product of American home industry was suddenly shaken. It is only fair to say that books on seamanship, being essentially an accumulation of facts, must be more or less compilations. Methods were too well established to allow much originality, even of treatment.
There were many other works of like character, the enumeration of which would be tedious.The Young Officer's Assistantwas less a specific title than a generic description. Several of them were contemporary; and one, by a Captain Boyd of the British navy, summed upthe convictions of us all, teachers as well as pupils, in the sententious aphorism: "It is by no means certain that coal whips will outlive tacks and sheets." It is scarcely kind to resurrect a prophecy, even when so guarded in expression and safely distant in prediction as was this; but I fear that for navies tacks and sheets are dead, and coal whips very much alive. The wish in those days fathered the thought. Who to dumb forgetfulness a prey could voluntarily relinquish all that had been so identified with life and thought, nor cast a longing, lingering look behind? So we plodded on, acquiring laboriously, yet lovingly, knowledge that would have fitted us to pass the examinations of Basil Hall and Peter Simple. To mention the details of cutting and fitting rigging, getting over whole and half tops, and other operations yet more recondite, would be to involve the unprofessional reader in a maze of incomprehensible terms, and the professional—of that period—in familiar recollections. Let me, however, linger lovingly for ten lines on the knotting—"knotting and splicing," as the never-divorced terms ran in the days when rigging a topgallant-yard was a constituent part of our curriculum. The man who has never viewed the realm of a seaman's knots from the outside, and tried to get in, must not flatter himself that he fully appreciates the phrase "knotty problem." I never got in; a few elementary "bends," a square knot, and a bowline, were very near the extent of my manual acquirements. The last I still retain, and use whenever I make up a bundle for the express; but before such mysteries—to me—as a Turk's-head and a double-wall, I merely bowed in reverence. When handsomely turned out, I could recognize the fact; but do them myself, no. I remember with humiliation that in 1862, being then a young lieutenant, I was called without warning to hear a section, one hour, in seamanship. As bad luck would have it, the subject happened to be knotting, and therewas one of the midshipmen who had made a cruise in a merchant-ship. The knots I had to ask about—to which that diabolical youngster invariably replied, "I can't describe it, sir, but I will make it for you"—the convolutions through which the strands went in his ready fingers, and my eyes vainly strove to follow, are a poignant subject. There was no room for the time-honored refuge of a puzzled instructor—"We will take up that subject next recitation;" the confounded boy was ready right along, and I had only to be thankful that there were "no questions asked."
There was one professional subject, "Naval Fleet Tactics" under sail, which at the end of my time shone forth with a kind of sunset splendor, the dying dolphin effect curiously characteristic of the passing period in which we were. This had always had a recognition—d'estime, as the French say; but in my final year it fell into the hands of a new instructor, who proceeded to glorify it by amplification. He was a very accomplished man in his profession, a student of it in all its branches, though there was among us a certain understanding that he was not an eminently practical seaman; and he eventually lost his life in what appeared to me a very unpractical manner, being where it did not seem his business to be, and doing work which a junior would probably have done better. We remember William III. at the battle of the Boyne. "Your majesty, the Bishop of Derry has been killed at the ford." "What business had he to be at the ford?" was the unsympathetic answer. The text-book used by our new instructor was by a French lieutenant, written in the thirties of the century, and characterized by something of the peculiar French naval genius. The simpler changes of formation were so simple that complication could not be got into them; but, that happy stage past, we went on to evolutions of huge masses of ships in three columns, in which thechanges of dispositions, from one order to another, became subjects of trigonometrical demonstration, quite as troublesome as Euclid. Sines, cosines, and tangents, of fractional angles figured profusely in the processes; and in the result courses to be steered would be laid down to an eighth of a point, when to keep a single vessel, let alone a column, steady within half a point[5]was considered good helmsmanship. There being no translation of the book, our text was provided by copying, individually, from a manuscript prepared by our teacher, which increased our labor; but, curiously enough, the effect of the whole procedure was so to magnify the subject as materially to increase the impression upon our minds.
This is really an interesting matter for speculation, as to what in effect is practical. The mastery of conclusions, to which practical effect never could have been given, served to drive home principles which would have come usefully into play, had the sail era continued and the United States maintained fleets of sailing battle-ships to handle. For myself personally, when I came to write naval history, long years after, I derived invaluable aid from the principles and the simpler evolutions, thus assimilated and remembered. But for them I should often have found it difficult to understand what with them was obvious. A singular circumstance thus brought out was the want of exactness and precision in English terminology in this field. The most notable instance that occurs to me was in Nelson's journal on Trafalgar morning, "The enemy wearing in succession," when, in fact, as a matter of manœuvre, the hostile fleet "wore together," though the several vessels wore "in succession;" a paradox only to be understood at a glance by those familiar with fleet tactics under sail.The usual version of the attack at Trafalgar has of late been elaborately disputed by capable critics. I myself have no doubt that they are quite mistaken; but it would be curious to investigate how far their argument derives from inexact phraseology—as, for example, the definition of "column" and "line" applied to ships.
These mathematical demonstrations of naval evolutions might be considered a lapse from practicalness characteristic of the particular officer. They took up a good deal of valuable time, and on any drill-ground manœuvres are less a matter of geometric precision than of professional aptitude and eye judgment. The same mistake could scarcely be addressed at that time to the other parts of the Academy curriculum. Either as foundation, or as a super-structure in which it was sought to develop professional intelligence, to inform and improve professional action, there was little to find fault with in detail, and less still in general principle. The previous reasonable professional prejudice had been in favor of the practical man, the man who can do things—who knowshowto do them; the new effort was to give the "why" of the "how," and to save time in the process by giving it systematically. In this sense—that all we learned ministered to professional intelligence—the scholastic part was thoroughly professional in tone; and I think I have shown that the outside professional sentiment was also strongly felt among us. There is always, of course, a disposition latent in educators to deny that practical work may be sufficiently accomplished by cruder processes—by what we call the rule of thumb—and a corresponding inclination to represent that to be absolutely necessary which is only an advantage; to exaggerate the necessity of mastering the "why" in order to put the "how" into execution. An instance in point, already quoted, is that of the professor who maintained that every officer should be able to calculate mathematically the relation between weights and purchases. But between 1855 and 1860, if such a tendency existed in germ, it had no effect in practice. As I look back, the relation between what we were taught and what we were to do was neither remote nor indirect. In its own sphere, in both its merits and its faults, the Academy was in aspiration as professional as the outside service.
This means that the Academy constituted for us an atmosphere perfectly accordant with the life for which we were intended; and an educational institution has no educative function to discharge higher than this. This influence was enhanced by the social customs, in favor of which disciplinary exactions were relaxed to the utmost possible; herein departing from the practice at the Military Academy, as then known to me. Not only on Saturdays and holidays, but every day, and at all hours not positively allotted to study or drills, the midshipmen might visit the houses of officers or professors to which they had the entrance. As a rule, very properly, no one was allowed to be absent from mess; but permission could always be obtained to accept an invitation to the evening meal with any of the families. This freedom of intercourse contributed its share to the formation of professional tone, for the heads of the families were selected professional men, who were thus met on terms of intimacy, precluded elsewhere by the official relations of the parties. More training is imparted by such association than by teaching—the familiar contrast of example and precept. An even greater gain, however—and a strictly professional gain, too—was the social facility thus acquired. In all callings probably, certainly in the navy, social aptitude is professionally valuable. Nelson's dictum that naval officers should know how to dance was only one way of saying that they should be men of affairs, at home in all conditions where men—or women—gather for business or amusement. Thephrase "all sorts and conditions of men" never had wider or juster application than to the assembly of green lads, from every variety of parentage and previous surroundings, pitchforked into Annapolis once every year; and, of all the humanizing and harmonizing influences under which they came, none exceeded that of the quiet gentlefolk, of modest means, with whom they mingled thus freely. Indeed, one of the most astute of our superintendents took into account the family of an officer before asking that he be ordered.
An element in our social environment which should not be omitted was the prevalence of a Southern flavor. In our microcosm, this reflected the general sentiment of the world outside, then slowly freeing itself from the spirit of compromise which had dominated the statesmanship of two generations in their efforts to reconcile the incompatible. There were certainly strong Northern men in plenty, as well as strong Southerners; but every Southerner was convinced that the justice was all on their side, that their rights as well as interests were being attacked, whereas the Northerners were divided in feeling. There were some pronounced abolitionists, here and there, prepared to go all party lengths; but in the majority from the North, the devotion to the Union, which rose so instantaneously to the warlike pitch when fairly challenged, for the present counselled concession to the utmost limit, if only thereby the Union might endure. In this the membership of the school reproduced the political character of the House of Representatives, with whom appointment rested; and at our age, of course, we simply re-echoed the tones of our homes. Never in my now long life have I seen so evident the power of conviction as in the Southern men I then knew. They simply had no hesitations; whereas we others were perplexed. Yet I now doubt whether the Southern conviction was not really, if unconsciously, the resolutionof despair; of doom felt, though unacknowledged; not before the attacks of the North, but before the resistless progress of the world, of which the North was to be the instrument. So also the patience of the North, if so noble a word can be conceded to our long temporizing, was an unconscious manifestation of latent power. To those who knew what the Union meant to those who exalted it—should I not rather say her?—in passionate adoration, need never have doubted what the response would be, if threat passed into act and hands were lifted against her. Conviction was absolute and deep-rooted on that side as on the other; but it was less on the surface, and sought ever a solution of peace.
The Muse of History of late years has become so analytic, and withal so embarrassed with the accumulations of new material, revealing still more the complication of causes which undoubtedly concur to any general result, that she is prone to overlook the overpowering influence of the simple elemental passions of human nature. "Our country, right or wrong," may be very bad morality, but it is a tremendous force to reckon with. One is wise overmuch who thinks that interest can restrain or statesmen control; wise unto folly who ignores that disinterested emotion, even unreasoning, may be just the one factor which diplomacy cannot master. I was in Rome when our late troubles with Spain came on, and dined with a number of the diplomatic body. "Oh yes," said to me one of these illuminati, "it is all very well to talk about humanity. The truth is, the United States wants Cuba." More profound was the remark of an American politician, who had recently visited the island. "I did not dare to tell all I saw; for, if I had, there would be no holding our people back." Personally, I believed that the interests of the United States made expedient the acquisition of Cuba, if righteously accomplished, and prior to the war I knew little of the conditions on theisland; but Cuba would be Spanish now, if interests chiefly had power to move us. So in the War of Secession. Innumerable precedent occurrences had produced a condition, but it was the passion for the Union, the strong loyalty to that sovereign, which dominated the situation, and in truth had been dominating it silently for years; a passion as profound and, though justifiable to reason, as unreasoning as any simple love that ever bound man to woman. Could this have been appreciated, what reams of demonstration might have been spared to foreign pens—demonstration of the folly, the hopelessness, the lust of conquest, the self-interest in myriad forms, which were supposed to be the actuating causes.
Effectively, the South had lost this love of the Union. In this respect the two sections, I fancy, had parted company, unwittingly, soon after the War of 1812; through which, as we all well know, in many quarters sectional feeling had still prevailed over national. The North had since moved towards national consciousness, the South towards sectional, on paths steadily and rapidly diverging. As I recall those days, when I first awoke to political observation, I should say that the feeling of my Southern associates towards the Union was that which men have towards a friend lately buried. Affection had not wholly disappeared; but life called. Let the dead bury their dead. I remember on my first practice cruise, in 1857, standing in the main-top of the ship with a member of the class immediately before mine, the son of a North Carolina member of Congress. "Yes," he said to me, "Buchanan [inaugurated four months before] will be the last President of the United States." He was entirely unmoved, simply repeating certitudes to which familiarity had reconciled him; I, to whom such talk was new, as much aghast as though I had been told my mother would die within the like term. This outlook was common to them all. The Union stillwas, and they continued in it; but to them the warning had sounded, they were ready and acquiescent in its fall; regretful, but resigned—very much resigned. This attitude was more marked among the younger men, those at the school. In the service outside I found somewhat the same point of view, but repulsion was keener. The navy then, even more than now, symbolized the exterior activities of the country, which are committed by the Constitution to the Union. Hence, the life of the profession naturally nurtured pride in the nation; and while States'-Rights had undermined the principle of loyalty to the Union, it had been less successful in destroying love for it. But to most the prospect was gloomy. That Massachusetts and South Carolina should be put into a pen together, and left to fight it out, was the solution expressed to me by a lieutenant who afterwards fell nobly, in command, on a Union deck in the war; the gallant Joe Smith, concerning whom runs a story that cannot be too widely known, even though often repeated. When it was reported to his father that theCongresshad surrendered, he said, simply, "Then Joe's dead." Joe was dead; but it is only fair to the survivors to say that ninety out of her crew of four hundred were also dead, the ship aground, helpless, and in flames.
In Annapolis, the capital of a border slave state, the general sentiment was, as might be expected, a blending of North and South; a desire to maintain the Union, but, distinctly superior in motive, sympathy with the Southern view of the case. In all my fairly intimate acquaintance with the small society of the town outside the Academy walls, there was but one family the heads of which were decisively Union—not Northern; and of it two sons fought in the Southern armies. Between this influence and that of my comrades I remained as I had been brought up—the Union first and above all, but with the conviction thatthe great danger to the Union lay in the abolition propaganda. My father was by upbringing a Virginian; by life-long occupation an officer of the general government, imbued to the marrow with the principles of military loyalty. Having married and continuously lived in the North, he had escaped all taint of the extreme States'-Rights school; but the memories of his youth kept him broadly Southern in feeling, less by local attachment than by affection for friends. More than twenty years after his death, when I was on court-martial duty in Richmond, an old Confederate general, whom I had never seen, sought me out in memory of the ties that had bound both himself and his wife's family to my father. With these clinging sympathies, the abolition agitation was an attack upon his friends, and, still worse, a wanton endangering of the Union. To save me from being carried away by the swelling tide was one of his chief aims.
Regarded by themselves, nothing can well be less important than the political opinions of one boy of eighteen to twenty; but few things are more important, if they are those of the mass of his generation, for then they are the echo from many homes. I believe, from what I saw at the Naval Academy, that mine were those of the large majority of the Northern youth, and that the very greatness of the concession which such were ready to make for the sake of the Union should have warned the disunionists that the same love was capable of equally great sacrifices in the other direction. They failed so to understand; chiefly, perhaps, because they could not appreciate the living force of the simple sentiment. Never in their lifetimes, if ever before, had the Union held the first place in the hearts of men of their section; and such love as had been felt was already moribund, overcome by supposed interest and local pride. Thus misled, it was easy to believe that in the North, controlled by considerations of advantage, yielding would follow yielding, even to permitting a disruption of the Union—a miscalculation of forces more fatal even than that of "Cotton is King." But forces will often be miscalculated by those who reckon interest as more powerful than principle or than sentiment.
Singularly enough, considering the exodus of States'-Rights officers from the navy at the outbreak of the War of Secession, my first service during it brought me into close relations with two captains, both Southerners, whose differing points of view shed interesting light upon the varying motives which in times of stress determined men into a common path. The first, Percival Drayton, a South-Carolinian, had a strength of conviction on the question of slavery, in itself, and the wrong-headed course of the slave power, as well as a strong devotion to the Union, all which were needed to keep a son of that extreme state firm in his allegiance. I question, however, whether any other one of the seceding communities furnished as large a proportion of officers who stuck to the national flag, chiefly among the older men; a result scarcely surprising, for the intensity of affection for the Union necessary to withstand nearest relatives and the headlong sweep of separatist impulse, where fiercest, naturally throve upon the opposition which it met, eliciting a corresponding tenacity of adherence to the cause it had embraced. No more than that other Southerner, Farragut, did Drayton feel doubt as to where he belonged in the coming struggle. "I cannot exactly see the difference between my relations fighting against me and I against them, except that their cause is as unholy a one as the world has ever seen, and mine just the reverse." "Were the sword in the one hand powerful enough, the secessionists would carry slavery with the other to the uttermost parts of the Union, and I do not think the North has been at all too quick in stopping the movement." "I do not think there will ever be peace between the two sections untilslavery is so completely scotched as to make extension a hopeless matter."[6]
Drayton stayed with us but a brief time. His successor, George B. Balch, who still survives, now the senior rear-admiral on the retired list of the navy, a man beloved by all who have known him for his gallantry, benevolence, and piety, was equally pronounced and equally firm; but his position illustrated and carried on my experiences at the Academy, and afterwards in the service, and for the time confirmed my old prepossessions. He was fighting for the Union, assailed without just cause; not against slavery, nor for its abolition. Were the latter the motive of the war, he would not be in arms. This, of course, was then the attitude of the government and of the people at large. Abolition, which came not long after, was a war measure simply; received with doubt by many, but which a few months of hostilities had prepared us all to accept. My own conversion was early and sudden. The ship had made an expedition of some fifty miles up a South Carolina river, in the course of which numerous negroes fled to her. Unlike Drayton, our captain was rather disconcerted, I think, at having forced upon him a kind of practical abolition, in carrying off slaves; but his duty was clear. As for me, it was my first meeting with slavery; except in the house-servants of Maryland, superficially a very different condition; and as I looked at the cowed, imbruted faces of the field-hands, my early training fell away like a cloak. The process was not logical; I was generalizing from a few instances, but I was convinced. Knowing how strongly my father had felt, I wondered how I should break to him my instability; but when we met I found that he, too, had gone over. Youngster as I still was, I should have divined the truth, that in assailing the Union his best friend becamehis enemy, to down whom abolition was good and fit as any other club. "My son," he said, "I did not think I could ever again be happy should our country fall into her present state; but now I am so absorbed in seeing those fellows beaten that I lose sight of the rest." Peculiar and personal association enhanced his interest; for, having been then over thirty years at the Military Academy, there were very few of the prominent generals on either side who had not been his pupils. The successful leaders were almost all from that school: Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Schofield, on the Union side; Lee, Jackson, and the two Johnstons on the Confederate, were all graduates, not to mention a host of others only less conspicuous.
In last analysis slavery may have been, probably was, the cause of the war; but, historically, it was not the motive. Lincoln's words—"I will save the Union with slavery, or I will save it without slavery, as the case may demand"—voiced the feeling prevalent in the military services, and also the will of the great body of the Northern people, whom he profoundly understood and in his own mental advance illustrated. I cannot but think that such an aim was more statesmanlike than would have been the attempt to overturn immediately and violently an entire social and economical system, for the establishment of which the current generation was not responsible. In the long run, to allow the tares of bondage to stand with the wheat of freedom was wiser than the wish prematurely to uproot. It had become the definite policy of the enemies of slavery to girdle the tree, by strict encompassing lines, leaving it to consequent sure process of decay. Its friends forced the issue. To the ones and to the others the harvest of generations, in the form it took, came unexpected and suddenly—a day of judgment, a crisis, like a thief in the night. It is a consummate proof of the accuracy of popular instinct, given time to work, that the uprising of 1861rested upon recognition of the fact that the cause of the nation and of the world depended more upon the preservation of a single authority over all the territory involved, upon the consequent avoidance of future permanent oppositions, than it did upon the destruction of a particular institution, the life of which might be protracted, but under conditions of union must wane and ultimately expire. The gradual progress of decision by the American people was wiser than the abrupt action asked by foreign impatience; and abolition came with less shock and more finality as a military measure than it could as a political. Its advisability was more evident. If statesmanship is shown in bringing popular will to accord with national necessity, Lincoln was in this most sagacious; but not the least element in the tribute due him is that he was the barometer of popular impulse, measuring accurately the invisible force upon which depended the energy of that stormy period.
Before taking final leave of my shore experiences at the Naval Academy, I will recall, as among them, the superb comet of the autumn of 1858, which we at the school witnessed evening after evening in October of that year, during the release from quarters following supper. After the lapse of so nearly a half-century, the survivors of those who saw that magnificent spectacle must be in a minority among their contemporaries, whether of that day or this. Since its disappearance there has been visible one other notable comet, which I remember waking my children after midnight to see; but compared with that of 1858, whether in size or in splendor, it was literally as moonlight unto sunlight, or, in impression, as water unto wine. As the astronomers compute the period of return for the earlier at two thousand years, more or less, we of that generation were truly singular in our opportunity of viewing this, among the very few "most magnificent of modern times."The tail, broadening towards the end, with a curve like that of a scimitar, was in length nearly a fourth of the span of the heavens, and its brightness that of a full moon. My memory retains the image with all the tenacity of eighteen.